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Tag Archives: SAP

At Cogent Integrated Business Solutions Inc., we’ve always been proud about being a minority owned enterprise, and about showcasing our diversity wherever we go. After being in business for more than 10 years, we are very excited to share the news that Cogent has been certified as a Minority Owned Business Enterprise (MBE) by MMSDC, as of December 2016.

This certification definitely encourages us to expand our efforts in sharing our diversity, by establishing ourselves as partners with organizations committed to working with businesses like us, in order to benefit from our services. This certification also supports our efforts to expand employment opportunities and job security, to other minorities as well.

As an IT services provider, offering consultative and results-driven solutions in SAP technologies, as well as providing employee productivity/ engagement and smart enterprise mobility products; getting this certification is an accomplishment for Cogent. We hope to enter, expand and deliver our technological offerings to the city and state governments, and educational institutions. We are very confident that the public and not-for-profit organizations will benefit tremendously through our capabilities.

Affiliation with MMSDC is surely a great start for Cogent as this allows hundreds of corporations access us through the council. Also, in conjunction with this certification; Cogent has already initiated the process to get certified with Michigan’s HUB program, by becoming a member of the Small Business Association. These certifications will not only open doors for us to enter the public domain; but, as an established SAP consulting and mobile product development company, we can now successfully deliver our solutions and services to a variety of clients and industries across Michigan, and continue to ensure we deliver the highest levels of service that will benefit the community as a whole.

On behalf of the Cogent team, here is a shout out to all the organizations out there open to collaborating with us, that, ‘we guarantee we will make you feel as happy, satisfied, and proud working with us; just like we feel about our products and services!’

Most technology companies’ annual customer conferences are conglomerations (this is a longer word for assemblies) of partners, employees and most importantly customers, and broadcasters and technological evangelists and marketeers and the new breed that is hovering the internets of late calling themselves “industry experts”, and the nagging feelings & the inevitable optimism the customers pushed down their systems the day they became customers of that company’s product(s).

If you can feign even a slight nod to the above thought, then you would not be mightily surprised to know that SAPPHIRE NOW is very much all of that and more, because SAP is the largest Enterprise software in the market right now and SAPPHIRE is that conglomeration organized by SAP in Orlando, Florida.

Cogent is not going to be at SAPPHIRE this year. And the reasons are many. As much as I hate to admit that there is a bit of a withdrawal syndrome that creeps into me when I think of not being there amidst the buzzing human energy that flows through such large conferences (all the more so, at an SAP event such as SAPPHIRE, where the fragrances emanating from the crowd are familiar ones), I don’t regret the decision we have made this year not to participate.

That doesn’t mean we are going to stay away from the event all together. This is the biggest event SAP hosts every year and with so much happening in the tech world (yes. one that revolves around SAP), with so many acquisitions of third party products and so many unanswered questions that customers have, how could we not follow the event?

But, is this event the most anticipated event in SAP’s calendar, especially for those of us who follow SAP’s trends closely?

The answer is NO, as I have to come to learn during the past few SAPPHIRE NOW conferences. This conference has really turned into more about SAP trying to reassure its customers that they are still the biggest enterprise software out there and hence they are too big to fail now. Yes, a couple of small & surprising announcements could come out of the conference every year, but largely, it is going to be exactly along the lines of what you would expect. SAP will talk about how hard they are working to ensure that their customers continue to get the best, how much value the last big buzz word/concept/solution they introduced during the past year has added to its some “BIG-NAME-CUSTOMERS”, etc. etc. You get the picture…

During the past few years, I actually have been more excited about going to SAPPHIRE to listen to the keynote sessions (those generic ones and not the SAP keynote sessions). Needless to add, SAPPHIRE is probably the best place to network with your past/current (and very rarely those one-off future) customers across industries and business partners whom you have done business with. So, to be there in person at SAPPHIRE is very unique and the experience of walking around the expo hall meeting people and sharing the common SAP bond is truly amazing. Nothing can come close to that.

As I get ready to follow SAPPHIRE online, what am I looking forward to this year?

Here they are, in no particular order:

1) The S/4 HANA Story – Adoption rate, Roadmap, etc.
2) HCP – HANA Cloud Platform – What is going to happen? What’s SAP’s commitment?
3) Hybris / Cloud Foundry – How confused is the marketplace?
4) Fiori – What is the future?
5) Apple/SAP Partnership – Is it just a headline grabbing announcement or is there more than what meets the eye?
6) SAP Technology – In general (what’s new, any innovative ideas, etc.)

If you are attending SAPPHIRE NOW this year in Orlando, I hope you get to enjoy the show.

PS: I hear that this little unknown band called “Coldplay” is playing on Thursday, May 19. Totally not envious of you, if are going to be there. Just sayin’.

Moreover, with multiple acquisitions the user count doubled, adding integration and compliance of business processes to the challenges.

User-friendly SAP PM screens were critical to mitigate the challenges involved. A couple of years ago, they had tried creating user-friendly screens for SAP PM with GUI-XT at one of the locations, however, the experiment had failed.

With SAP announcing SAP Screen Personas 3.0 in 2015 there was new hope, however, they didn’t have any prior experience with the tool. They needed a team of experts who had done this before to come out and help them in the shortest possible time.

Cogent was chosen for the job.

Our Solution & Approach

Per SAP’s UX best practices, Cogent conducted a 2 day workshop at one of the plants involving business, IT and user teams. At the end of the workshop personas and flavors were defined and wireframes were drawn for each transaction screens. System requirements and gaps were identified for Personas 3.0 readiness.

All possible business process changes were considered and implemented including PM customizations. A prototype was developed in the sandbox and approved with business, IT and user inputs.

Corporate themes and best practices were defined and documented in a manual followed by Screen Personas flavor creations.

A Launchpad with Fiori visual features was developed to launch this real world commercial application.

Simple/Easy Launchpad

Custom Flavors

4 screens simplified into a single screen

Expectations

Minimal change management issues due to easy adoption by non-super users like Plant Mechanics (both old and new users)

100% business process compliance

100% SAP adoption

Increased user productivity

Reduction in training cost & time

Significant increase in data quality

Note: Contact us at contact@cogentibs.com, if you want to learn more about how SAP Screen Personas can change user experience for the better, at all levels in your organization. Also, ask us about our free prototype offer.